Collaborative Mobility Research Articles

The International Nurse Regulator Collaborative Mobility Project: Transjurisdictional Mobility—Is It Possible?

Background The current global environment has led to increased mobility of nurses—and increasing pressure from governments to recruit more nurses into their workforces. Purpose To explore whether transjurisdictional mobility was possible, members of the International Nurse Regulator Collaborative (INRC) participated in research to investigate the possibility of recognizing existing licensure or registration and thereby reducing barriers and allowing for more streamlined mobility between INRC jurisdictions. Methods Using a mixed methods, multi-phased, multiple-case study design, regulatory processes and practices were investigated in each jurisdiction; findings were then compared across eight participating jurisdictions. Three research phases moved from a high-level jurisdictional overview, through expected standards underpinning nursing practice, to specific operational processes and outcomes. Issues and challenges in licensing/registering transjurisdictional INRC applicants were identified. Results A high level of consistency was found in the expectations, standards, and operational processes across jurisdictions. Challenges existed in relation to requirements for and assessments of educational qualifications despite entry to practice competencies and educational program approval requirements being largely the same. Jurisdictional regulators worked under different legislative frameworks, which may potentially create different challenges and timelines for moving toward transjurisdictional mobility. Balancing mobility with the core regulatory responsibility of maintaining public safety will be a key challenge. Conclusion Transjurisdictional mobility could potentially exist between jurisdictions with common regulatory principles, processes, and standards. Applicants moving between these jurisdictions present low risk. Streamlining processes could reduce regulatory workload while maintaining safety to the public. The current global environment has led to increased mobility of nurses—and increasing pressure from governments to recruit more nurses into their workforces. To explore whether transjurisdictional mobility was possible, members of the International Nurse Regulator Collaborative (INRC) participated in research to investigate the possibility of recognizing existing licensure or registration and thereby reducing barriers and allowing for more streamlined mobility between INRC jurisdictions. Using a mixed methods, multi-phased, multiple-case study design, regulatory processes and practices were investigated in each jurisdiction; findings were then compared across eight participating jurisdictions. Three research phases moved from a high-level jurisdictional overview, through expected standards underpinning nursing practice, to specific operational processes and outcomes. Issues and challenges in licensing/registering transjurisdictional INRC applicants were identified. A high level of consistency was found in the expectations, standards, and operational processes across jurisdictions. Challenges existed in relation to requirements for and assessments of educational qualifications despite entry to practice competencies and educational program approval requirements being largely the same. Jurisdictional regulators worked under different legislative frameworks, which may potentially create different challenges and timelines for moving toward transjurisdictional mobility. Balancing mobility with the core regulatory responsibility of maintaining public safety will be a key challenge. Transjurisdictional mobility could potentially exist between jurisdictions with common regulatory principles, processes, and standards. Applicants moving between these jurisdictions present low risk. Streamlining processes could reduce regulatory workload while maintaining safety to the public.

Ontologies on collision course: Collaborative mobility v. managerial transport in the contemporary history of intelligent transport systems

Is mobility ontologically different than transport? This essay contributes to this contentious question by looking at the frictions and failures of merging intelligent transport systems (ITS) with mobile information and communication technologies (mobile-ICT). Adopting a methodological approach from science and technology studies (STS), which focus on (political) ontologies, enables us to follow the ordering practices and constituent elements participating in the enactment of multiple ontologies. The dissonance between ITS and mobile-ICT can thus be regarded as the enactment of two ontologies, one managerial and one collaborative. The tensions between these traditions enable us to articulate the differing institutions and sensibilities that characterise a managerial and a collaborative ontology. Thus, how we approach transport can be understood either as under the spell of managerial functionality or as collaboratively achieved pending on “what is” transport. By looking at frictions when defining ITS, we can identify two ontologies that have existed within the history of transport, traffic and mobility.

Collaborative Mobility: Common Features in a new Generation of Mobility Business Models

Mobility has been massively disrupted by new-generation telecoms and mobile apps, which allow an optimised utilisation of both transport means and infrastructures. When it comes to this kind of mobility, transport authorities and ‘traditional’ transport planning can only do little. Citizens step in and fill in the gaps at the local level by co-creating mobility solutions: private and commercial vehicles, tracking and geo-location capabilities, smart communication devices, a transportation infrastructure grid. Without additional investment in physical assets for marginal uses of the infrastructure, and without adding more vehicles to the streets, it becomes possible to ‘kick start’ a new mobility ‘metabolism’ through collaborative solutions that concatenate several ‘sharing’ approaches: car-pooling, car-sharing, crowd-parking, bike-sharing, cargo-pooling, data-sharing.In sum, new technologies can bridge social capital and citizen power with the valuable aspects of free market economics. In addition, crowd-sourcing mobility solutions make economic sense and bring democratic thinking and environmental conscience.

REAL: Reality-Enhanced Applied Games

Pervasive games are an emerging genre combining reality and computing. This article presents a suite of simple pervasive serious games we have developed to explore the concept of “reality-enhanced gaming,” a pattern to tie game play mechanics to the outcomes/measurements of real-world activities. The prototype games were realized in the context of TEAM, an industrial research project aimed at developing apps for flexible and collaborative mobility. The proposed games are examples of different user interfaces we considered useful to meet various significant scenarios, goals and user typologies, especially for improving car driving styles. Given the variety of information sources, contexts of use, and target users, we abstracted a game-oriented framework [Reality-Enhanced AppLied (REAL) games], in order to support reuse and scalability. Through a set of RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs), the REAL framework separates sensor data from actual game implementations, so as to provide different experiences to users, according to their specific needs and preferences. This concept—which allows serious game developers to focus on their specific game logic while seamlessly exploiting a variety of field sensors—is general and may be applied to a variety of domains. We validated REAL developing and field testing five typologies of serious games. Subjective evaluation results show a good level of satisfaction and perceived usefulness. More tests are needed, especially in terms of different application contexts, impact on developers, number and variety of users, and exposure time. However, outcomes confirm the significant potential of reality-enhanced game design and the importance of tools for supporting their development.

TEAM Applications for Collaborative Road Mobility

The tomorrow's elastic adaptive mobility industrial research project developed eleven collaborative mobility apps addressing various traffic issues and scenarios. The apps, involving different aspects and degrees of collaboration (e.g., direct user participation, shared objectives, coordination, etc.), aim at increasing the driver/traveler awareness and support a better behavior. This paper describes the apps and the underlying system architecture shared by the participating car manufacturers. Then, it provides a user acceptance analysis grouping the apps according to the three main types of users and stakeholders: drivers, travelers, and administrators/operators. Data, collected in five European countries, shows that acceptance and expected impact are positive. The actual road-test experience did not diminish the high expectations raised by an initial presentation on paper, showing a good maturity of the prototypes. The Administrator app cluster shows a slightly better assessment, highlighting the importance of considering collaborative mobility as a system, including road, infrastructure, and traffic management.

Big Data Aided Vehicular Network Feature Analysis and Mobility Models Design

Vehicular networks play a pivotal role in intelligent transportation system (ITS) and smart city (SC) construction, especially with the coming of 5G. Mobility models are crucial parts of vehicular network, especially for routing policy evaluation as well as traffic flow management. The big data aided vehicle mobility analysis and design attract researchers a lot with the acceleration of big data technology. Besides, complex network theory reveals the intrinsic temporal and spatial characteristics, considering the dynamic feature of vehicular network. In the following content, a big GPS dataset in Beijing, and its complex features verification are introduced. Some novel vehicle and location collaborative mobility schemes are proposed relying on the GPS dataset. We evaluate their performance in terms of complex features, such as duration distribution, interval time distribution and temporal and spatial characteristics. This paper elaborates upon mobility design and graph analysis of vehicular networks.

Usage of Smartphone Data to Derive an Indicator for Collaborative Mobility between Individuals

The potential of geospatial big data has been drawing attention for a few years. Despite the larger and larger market penetration of portable technologies (nomadic and wearable devices like smartphones and smartwatches), their opportunities for travel behavior analysis are still relatively unexplored. The main objective of our study is to extract the human mobility patterns from GPS traces in order to derive an indicator for enhancing Collaborative Mobility (CM) between individuals. The first step, extracting activity duration and location, is done using state-of-the-art automated recognition tools. Sensors data are used to reconstruct individual’s activity location and duration across time. For constructing the indicator, in a second step, we defined different variables and methods for specific case studies. Smartphone sensor data are being collected from a limited number of individuals and for one week. These data are used to evaluate the proposed indicator. Based on the value of the indicator, we analyzed the potential for identifying CM among groups of users, such as sharing traveling resources (e.g., carpooling, ridesharing, parking sharing) and time (rescheduling and reordering activities).

How activism matters for creating the electromobility 2.0 industry?

We are currently witnessing the re-introduction of EVs into the market, the increase in R&D expenditures by battery manufacturers, the emergence of new mobility players who do not belong to the traditional auto industry, as well as the activism of lobbyists defending the development of a clean, collaborative or smart mobility. All of this begs again the question: are EVs the signs of a new emerging industry? This research is founded on a review of existing literature on business strategy, so as to identify those elements which are necessary to enlarge firm boundaries in an emerging industry, namely those linked to reputation and activism to empower. Our paper then analyses two business cases: Tesla Motors and Better Place.

Welcome message for the Special Issue "USCIAMO: Urban Sustainable, CollaboratIve, and Adaptive MObility"

Welcome message for the Special Issue "USCIAMO: Urban Sustainable, CollaboratIve, and Adaptive MObility"

Distributed and Collaborative Node Mobility Management for Dynamic Coverage Improvement in Hybrid Sensor Networks

With recent advances in deploying sensor nodes mounted on mobile platforms, node mobility is becoming an attractive alternative to improve network coverage dynamically in sensor networks. However, due to energy constraints, it may not be cost effective to deploy a large number of mobile nodes for continuous movements. It might be more desirable to allow only a certain number of nodes to be mobile depending on the affordable cost and desired performance levels. This paper proposes an efficient distributed mobility protocol for mobile node navigation in a hybrid sensor network consisting of both static and mobile nodes to provide efficient time-varying coverage after the initial deployment. In the proposed scheme, mobile nodes collaborate with neighboring static nodes to find their candidate locations to move at each movement step in order to maximize the coverage time of the area not covered by static nodes. We also develop an efficient sequential algorithm to find the exposure in a hybrid network, which reflects the best path for a target to traverse the sensing region without being detected. By simulations, we show the effectiveness of the proposed mobility protocol in terms of the presence probability matrix and coverage time and show its suitability at the worst-case target exposure.

Collaborative mobility: using geographic information science to cultivate cooperative transportation systems

It is increasingly clear that many of the existing transportation systems in the world are inefficient, inequitable and unsustainable. In many places, we have evolved a rigid transportation monoculture that forces people to adapt to the system rather than a flexible, responsive and user-friendly transportation polyculture that can adapt more easily to people and their activities. However, creating a flexible and responsive transportation system will require more coordination and cooperation across a variety of spatial scales and time horizons than is evident in our current, competitive systems. This lecture will discuss the role of collaboration in developing the next generation of transportation systems, and the role of geographic information science in facilitating cooperation across space and time for strategic, tactical and operational decision-making in transportation.

A Scalable Multicasting with Group Mobility Support in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, an application scenario requires mostly collaborative mobility behavior. The key problem of those applications is scalability with regard to the number of multicast members as well as the number of the multicast group. To enhance scalability with group mobility, we have proposed a multicast protocol based on a new framework for hierarchical multicasting that is suitable for the group mobility model in MANET. The key design goal of this protocol is to solve the problem of reflecting the node's mobility in the overlay multicast tree, the efficient data delivery within the sub-group with group mobility support, and the scalability problem for the large multicast group size. The results obtained through simulations show that our approach supports scalability and efficient data transmission utilizing the characteristic of group mobility.